


What Is Begotten

by alestar



Category: The Eagle | The Eagle of the Ninth (2011)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, M/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 03:38:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13045710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alestar/pseuds/alestar
Summary: Esca learns the Latin word by accident, from Stephanos of all people.Soul-mate.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [felix814](https://archiveofourown.org/users/felix814/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, felix814! I hope this is anything like anything that you wanted. I had a few false starts, and I kept researching things that were completely inconsequential to the story, like peat moss, but my holiday wishes are very sincere.

"'And there is a story,' said she, 'that people in love are those who are seeking for their other half, but my story tells that love is not for a half, nor indeed the whole... since men are willing to cut off their own hands and feet, if these seem to them to be faulty.'"  
          -- Plato, _Symposium_

 

 

A few days before Saturnalia, Marcus has a dream that he's being led in chains to a dark room crowded with unwashed bodies.  The shackles around his wrists are unlocked by rough hands, and then he's shoved into the dimness, colliding with the shoulder of another man, who growls.  Before the large wooden door swings shut, the jailor says in Latin (strange that Marcus should remember that distinctly, the man speaking Latin), "Slaves who can't suck cock can feed lions."

It's the freshness of that dream, perhaps, that inspires the strange fire inside Marcus when he and his uncle attend the circus games and he sees the young slave fall.

Whatever it is, he watches the gladiator press the sword-tip against the slave's sternum with a tight knot of pain in his own chest, and a protective rage comes over him.  Suddenly everyone in the arena with thumbs pointed downward is his enemy.  He rails against them, forgetting himself, forgetting his ruined leg, feeling all of that dream man's banked anger and snarling resentment.   

Three days later, Uncle Aquila buys the slave for Marcus.  His name is Esca.  

He speaks Latin with a Brythonic accent, softening and lengthening the vowels and clipping the consonants, and he stares at Marcus from deep-set eyes with unequivocal grimness.  He swears a blood oath to Marcus for saving his life, but there's no gratitude in his face, only resolve.  Marcus nods his assent, and then Esca takes a station near the wall, hands clasped in front of him, looking into the middle distance.  

Marcus does not know what to do with a slave.  Stephanos and Sassticca have hovered over him since he came to live in Calleva, so eager to help that Marcus never has to ask them for anything.  His aunt in Rome had slaves, but Marcus had been so alienated in that household that he'd never felt he had the authority or presence to ask them for anything, either.  But Uncle Aquila is right that Stephanos can't attend to both his uncle and Marcus-- and right, also, with the unspoken assertion that Marcus can no longer take care of himself.  

After nearly an hour of Esca's presence pricking like a needle in Marcus's attention, Marcus looks up to see Esca staring at his injured thigh.  

"What is it," he snaps.  

Esca's gaze lifts to meet his calmly.  "Nothing," he says.  "The night before the gladiator fight, I had a dream my leg was wounded."

 

+

 

Esca spends most of his first few days training with Stephanos.  He learns where the cloths and basins are kept, what he may take from the kitchen, who to ask for in the stables.  He's told sternly where he is to stand during meals and what foods Marcus does and doesn't like-- and what foods are good for his healing, which he should eat even if he doesn't like them.  He goes to market with Stephanos to meet vendors and Aquila's banker and the mason who keeps up the hypocaust.  At first, Stephanos insists that Esca address Marcus as _dominus_ , but when Marcus refuses to answer to it, he relents.

Stephanos demonstrates how to wet a tuft of wool in a mash of rue and goat fat, to draw out the fever in Marcus's leg; he shows him how to apply the salve by dressing the injury himself while Marcus looks away, stone-faced.  

All told, Marcus (prideful) and Esca (unused to such service) manage to go nearly a week before making direct physical contact.  

By the end of the sixth day, they have established a night-time routine that involves very little talking.  Esca brings a pitcher of water from the kitchen and fills the basin that rests on Marcus's oakwood trunk.  Marcus murmurs a thanks, to which Esca does not reply, then pulls off his tunic and throws it into a basket that Esca will take away in the morning.  He washes his face and under his arms, leaning heavily with a hip against the trunk to keep the weight off his leg.  Afterwards, Esca hands Marcus a towel.  It is nearly comfortable; neither of them wants to talk to the other.

At the end of the sixth day, however, Marcus stumbles on his way to bed.  He has just thrown his soiled towel into the basket for Esca and turned too quickly toward the bed when his leg, overworked from nearly a week of Marcus's sullen displays of independence, bows cruelly beneath him.  Esca darts forward to catch him with a grip on Marcus's bare arm-- and both men gasp.  They tumble to the floor together, muscles contracting, burning from the inside.

Esca rolls away, panting like a hound.  

Marcus looks at him, eyes wide, hand white-knuckled on the corner of the oakwood trunk.  "What did you do?" he asks.

Esca shakes his head.  

"Did you--" Marcus looks at his arm where Esca touched him.  "You burned me."

"No," Esca says lowly.  He pushes himself up, rubbing the hand he'd laid on Marcus's arm.  He raises his eyes to Marcus, jaw tight.  "No, it burns everywhere."

It's true.  The place where Esca touched him burns like a brand, but the sensation is echoed in the skin all over his body, except in his leg, where the sharp throb of his wound drowns out all else.  "You-- poisoned me."

"No," Esca says again.  He reaches his hand out, and Marcus glares to keep him at bay, though he knows he is defenseless in this position: crumpled on the floor over his wounded leg, a mysterious poison coursing through his system.  

Esca turns his hand palm-upward, fingers curling toward himself, placating.  He approaches like that, scooting across the floor-- then he lowers his hand, softly, knuckle-first, to the ankle of Marcus's uninjured leg.  Immediately, relief washes through Marcus like water, and all his breath leaves him in a huff.  Esca's eyes drop closed, mouth parting.  

"What witchcraft is this?" Marcus says.  

He watches Esca's hand on his leg turn, sliding his palm up Marcus's calf, spreading his fingers in a loose grip.  Again Esca shakes his head, letting out a long breath.  "It is not of my doing."  

They sit together on the floor for a while, not talking.

Finally, Esca says, "I'll help you to bed."  He pulls his hand back, and the burning doesn't return, but the feeling of water vanishes, leaving only a sense of abandoned space.  He climbs to his feet, and Marcus does the same, one hand on the oakwood trunk and the other clenched on Esca's arm.  The place where their skin touches feels deliciously cool, a bead of rain water on sun-baked mud.  He releases Esca's arm as soon as he can to collapse into the bed.  

Esca dowses the lamp, quickly undresses and drops heavily onto the wool-stuffed mattress next to the door.  

"Good night," Marcus says, because that is part of their routine.

"Good night," Esca says.  

Marcus lies awake for a long time, thoughts churning.  The blood oath, he thinks-- Esca's blood oath did something to them, a Briton magic.  Tomorrow he can ask his uncle for a lamb to take to the temple at the north city-wall.  He can't explain why he needs a sacrifice, of course: if a slave were implicated in witchcraft, he would be sent away at best and more likely executed. The thought fills Marcus with horror.  He could tell his uncle that the sacrifice was for his healing, or his family's honor-- but to take a lamb under false pretenses would be akin to stealing, and besides being dishonorable surely such a tribute would have no good effects.  

Marcus's mind shifts restlessly while the moon climbs higher-- and eventually a shaft of moonlight from the latticed veranda door catches in the white of Esca's eyes.

"You're awake?" Marcus says lowly.  He watches Esca's eyes move toward him in the dimness.

"Yes," Esca says, after a long moment.  "My leg pains me."

 

+

 

The next morning, Marcus sends Esca for bread and wine and cedar resin, and he lays up an offering on the altar in his room.  He runs the blade of Esca's father's dagger through the column of scented smoke, dips the tip into the shallow pool of wine, and then gives it to Esca.

Esca takes the dagger in his hand, looking expressionlessly down at the blade.  It occurs to Marcus belatedly to wonder if he has desecrated it.  

"To undo the magic," Marcus says.  "That we felt last night.  I'm giving it back to you."

But Esca only places his father's dagger on the trunk next to Marcus's goat salve. "The dagger has a human oath in it.  A life-binding is made by the gods."

Marcus frowns.  "A life-binding?"

" _Anam-cara_ ," Esca says.  "I don't know the word for it in your tongue.  Life, the life inside you.  The ghost."  He looks flatly at Marcus.  "We are ghost-companions."

It's an unfamiliar phrase, but as Marcus stares at him, Esca huffs a breath.  His hand lifts and hovers a moment, again palm-up, before he sets the backs of his fingers against Marcus's arm.  

His brows draw together, and suddenly Marcus senses an image, like a long-buried memory-- a diaphanous form made of stories Esca heard around a hearth-fire, enraptured, later filled in with his own strange relief when he'd touched Marcus a second time.  An image of two men, or two women, or a woman and a man fighting next to each other, fierce and unshakably loyal, sharing unspoken thoughts, hearts beating in time with each other.  Marcus knows the word for that well enough.  It is not a thing to be made or broken during one's life.  Esca's face is grim.  

"But we have different gods," Marcus says.  The thought of Mithras leaving Marcus to the whims of a blue-skinned barbarian god is unsettling.  Whatever his father's failings, Marcus is surely not _that_ unvalued-- not _that_ abandoned.

He unseats Esca's hand with a small shake of his arm.

Esca turns with a faint snort to gather the wine cup and wooden bread plate, to return them to the kitchen.  "Perhaps it's only Roman humans who speak nothing but Latin."

 

+

 

After that, life continues, made partly of habit, partly of secrecy, partly of the strange commerce of sensation between them-- and their unspoken agreement to deal with that commerce as obliquely as possible.

For all that Marcus wishes it were otherwise, he is not capable of getting around much by himself, so they can't avoid physical contact.  Their fingers brush as they pass objects between them, and Marcus's arm presses Esca's bare neck when Esca takes his weight as they walk.  

Esca applies the salve to Marcus's injured leg as he was shown, but when the dressing is finished he sits for a long moment with his palm pressed flat over Marcus's thigh-- a touch that cools the fever in the wound and warms everything else, while Marcus tries to fill his mind with noise, memorized equations and historical dates, no military secrets, none of his uncle's financials, even as his limbs grow heavy with a feeling of peace.  Marcus does not welcome a lingering touch at any other time.  

One day, near the beginning, he catches a brief grimace on Esca's face as Esca withdraws his hand.  

"It pains you to touch me," Marcus says.  

But Esca shakes his head.  "It feels to me as it feels to you."  He glances at Marcus.  "It is a comfort to you," he adds, but there is a question in it.  

Marcus nods tersely.  

Beyond that, they never speak of it.  When his leg pains him overmuch or his heartsickness from lying abed and considering his future is too great, or when he finds himself yearning for Esca's touch, Marcus sends Esca on pointless errands-- _fetch some wine_ or _help reshoe the horses_ or _check the market for plums_.  Some days he gives Esca leave to hunt, just to get him away from the villa, and on those days there is a wild restlessness clawing at Marcus's skin.

One day when Esca has been away for several hours, Marcus is at a table leaned over one of his uncle's books when he feels a pulse of something, of intent, and looks up to realize the fog of arousal that has curled up around him, unnoticed.  He closes his book and clasps his hands on the cover.  

He well knows what is happening.  He breathes heavily at the thought of it: Esca is a beauty, proud and well-made.  He can imagine Esca's solemn brow pinched, the pink bow of his mouth parting as he strokes himself, his head tossing against the tree bark, the sunlight through the winter canopy catching on the gold of his beard.  For a moment Marcus sees his own face, staring meditatively out the veranda door, the strong cords of his neck limned in light. He lets loose a heavy breath as Esca's release washes through him, shivering, like a fever breaking.

 

+

 

One of Uncle Aquila's friends, the praetor Quintus Avidius Atta, visits the villa at Calleva with his son, Lucius Messias. Lucius is cheerful and polite, a few years younger than Marcus, and he asks questions about the Second Legion at Isca Dumnoniorum-- not Marcus's injury or stillborn military career, but the valor of Marcus and his men-- with such enthusiasm that Marcus finds himself answering in kind. He remembers in himself a love for talk of military routines, training exercises, fortifications, the ribaud humor of soldiers.

Marcus has not been good company of late, particularly to his uncle's Roman friends, who remind Marcus how ruined he is-- but he finds himself enjoying dinner with Lucius and his father. Esca moves around them, filling cups and gathering dishes, and his presence is a pleasant fixture on the edge of Marcus's awareness, like the smell of the wild-cherry logs burning on the brazier hearth.

"Your slave is Brigantes," Lucius says, after Esca has scooped up several bowls of fish bones and denuded grape stems and carried them away. He points to his own arm. "He has the markings."

Quintus Avidius nods. "Probably taken in the last rebellion, a few years ago, near Calatum."

"Yes," Uncle Aquila says. "Seven years now, isn't that right, Marcus?"

Marcus nods. He knew the history before he came to Britain, and now he knows it better: has seen it in his mind, in nightmares that shook him awake, that left him and Esca breathing hard together in the same room, feet away from each other, mutually unacknowledged.

"I imagine it's difficult having a household slave who wasn't born to it," says Quintus Avidius. "Especially a young man, I would imagine, and a Briton at that."

"No," Marcus says, eager to move the conversation on before Esca returns from the kitchen but unable to explain to himself why-- it isn't unreasonable to explain to visitors, in front of Esca, that Esca is a good slave, hard-working, strong, intelligent, obedient, all that Marcus could ask of him. Esca _is_ all of those things, and they are praises. "But now that you mention it, in Isca Dumnoniorum there was a Gaulish auxiliary who--"

When Esca returns to refill their wine, Marcus is more aware of him-- and aware, too, of Lucius openly watching him. Marcus doesn't need a life-binding with Lucius to know what the younger man sees: a fine-featured slave with strong hands, intelligent blue-grey eyes and a soft-looking mouth, whose lowered gaze always looks only focused, driven, and not deferential.

"He's well-made," Lucius says, when Esca withdraws again. "You say he doesn't cause you trouble?"

Marcus nods, feeling his mouth harden.

"Your uncle has graciously offered me and my father separate quarters. Maybe your slave could attend me tonight?" Lucius asks it with the same polite guilelessness with which he asked for stories of Marcus's command. "When you're done with him?"

Marcus's face heats.  Lucius glances back at him when he doesn't answer-- and he probably assumes that Marcus's stony, down-turned gaze is due to shame, because Marcus's incapacity is so great that he requires his body-slave at all hours-- but Esca comes in from the kitchen, with nothing in his hands, concerned eyes seeking Marcus.

"No," Marcus says lowly. "I am never done."

He withdraws soon after that, with a stiff farewell to Quintus Avidius and an apologetic-looking Lucius. Esca helps him from the table, thin-lipped as Marcus's confused, helpless rage passes between them.  They prepare for bed in silence until Esca is making ready to dowse the lamp, when Marcus says, "Come here."

Esca comes to stand beside the bed, and Marcus can't bring himself to take Esca's hands, as he wants to, or to invite him to sit on the bed-- so he says, "Kneel."  Esca's eyebrows draw together, but he obeys, and Marcus thinks unbidden of his dream just before meeting Esca: of the jailor saying, _Slaves who can't suck cock can feed lions_.

Marcus breathes out a long breath and then frames Esca's jaw in his hands, leaning forward until their foreheads touch. The heat of his anger, his panic, nearly, cools as they breathe together. In the connection between them Marcus feels nothing but Esca's watchfulness and patience, the relief _Esca_ finds in their touch, and that hard, impenetrable thing that he thinks is Esca's resolve.

"You will not be required to service another master while I am alive," Marcus says.

"And if you die?" Esca murmurs.

Marcus swallows. "I'll talk to my uncle."

He feels the briefest curl of grim amusement from Esca, something cold and sardonic, before Esca pulls away from him and says, "We should sleep."

Esca dowses the lamp and lies down on his pallet, and in the dark Marcus's mind settles into thoughts of an ownership that has nothing to do with Marcus's legal mastery of Esca, but is, at the same time, complicated by it.  He thinks of Esca's father's dagger, still sitting on his oakwood trunk, a further complication. Marcus can't bring himself to think the word _mine_ \-- but he can't forget the look of interest on Lucius's face as he gazed at Esca, so he circles the track of his thoughts, over and over, getting nowhere. Neither of them sleep.

 

+

 

The week of Lupercalia there is snow on the ground, but the crust of ice on the pond has begun to crack.  Another of Uncle Aquila's old friends, a field surgeon named Rufrius Galarius, comes to the Aquila household to reopen and repair the wound in Marcus's leg.

Esca helps to make Marcus's room ready for surgery, bringing clean cloths and a basin of steaming hot water, and when there are no other preliminaries to settle, Esca gazes down at him, a terrible feedback loop of uneasiness between them.

Marcus shifts his eyes to the painted ceiling.  "You can go."

"No," says the surgeon, "I'm going to need the slave to hold you down."

Marcus frowns. "Can't my uncle do it?"  He knows the pain his leg has caused the other man in the night, or when Marcus steps on it wrong in an unguarded moment.  Surely it will be worse if they are touching.  

And something else-- every night, every day, every time their eyes meet, there is a fingertip pressing at the skin that separates them, in a place that wears thinner and thinner.  Marcus knows he will not have the strength to maintain the stretched-thin barrier between them when his mind is swimming in pain.  He is afraid of what Esca will see.  

Esca approaches.  He sets his hands on Marcus's clothed shoulders and leans into him.  

"Put your weight on him, slave," the surgeon orders.  He places the edge of his scalpel against the swollen, fevered seam of Marcus's wound.  Esca shifts to press his arm lengthways across Marcus's chest, still careful to keep the cloth of Marcus's tunic between them.

"Harder!" yells the surgeon.  

Finally Esca releases a breath and puts his palm against Marcus's forehead, bending over him fully and spreading his fingers.  The familiar warmth spreads out from Esca's touch, but not enough to combat the animal panic seizing his limbs.  They stare at each other, and Marcus can feel the desperation in the other man, the frantic protectiveness behind the stoic gaze.  The surgeon's knife digs in, and Marcus holds Esca's eyes even as his body bows helplessly forward.

Marcus feels a different kind of pressure, then, more than Esca's arms holding him down-- a blunt force in his mind pushing him out of his own body.  Shoving at him, wrapping around him.  From Esca's unmoving mouth he hears, _leave it, leave it_.

 

* * *

 

You look up from the shadows of the portico into the courtyard of your step-uncle's villa in Rome.  There's a faint ache in your left leg; you wore it out today.  You left first thing in the morning to wander the Forum Augustus and the market, listening to foreign tongues, looking over the exotic wares-- but you are expected home in the evening for dinner, so now you wait, dismally, to be summoned to dine.

You have never been lonelier than you were here.  You thought you'd woken from that nightmare when you joined the army-- but it turns out that the soldier's life of order and camaraderie was a dream, and loneliness the true life.  You miss your mother.  

You are sitting on a stone bench, leaning back against Esca's chest.  Esca's arms are circled loosely around you.

He raises a hand to point at a lone pear tree growing against a low stone wall of the courtyard.  Its branches spread beyond the wall, over-large for such a cultivated space; Marcus's step-uncle will probably have it torn down and replaced with a topiary or a sculpted rose bush come the winter.  It has only one pear left, pale skin blushing a dark red, heavy with juice, nearly ready to drop.

"Watch for it," Esca says, breath brushing your cheek, warm like a summer breeze.  You know he is not speaking Latin.  "It will be ready soon."

 

* * *

 

Marcus wakes in his bedroom in the late afternoon sun.  Esca is sitting on his pallet near the door.  He looks up as Marcus opens his eyes, then rises and helps Marcus drink some water, Marcus's head cradled carefully in his hand.  

"Did I shame myself," Marcus murmurs.

Esca shakes his head no, gazing solemnly down at the other man, but Marcus does not believe him.

In the days ahead, Marcus returns Esca's father's dagger to its place in a carved cedar box, and Esca asks no questions of it.  When Marcus eats, Esca stands at his station, blank-faced, holding a jug of wine, then he gathers the empty plates, taking them into the kitchen where Marcus never follows.  Sometimes they share dreams.  Marcus learns the look of Esca's mother's face, and can tell probably better than Esca can how much his eyes are like hers.  Desire settles between them like mud between paving stones.

They face the truth of their bond in the same way they have faced their other losses: Marcus with brooding and avoidance, and Esca with stoic acceptance.  

It is not a terrible thing-- Esca was honest when he said the contact was not unpleasant-- but the fact of the bond is a dismal confirmation of all the two men have suspected of themselves in recent months.  

Marcus an exile, bound to Britain, bound to the lowest caste of society; ordained by the gods as a man of the borderlands, who needs to put away any hope of reclaiming his family's honor.

And Esca, homeless and diminished, now only half-Brigantes, claimed by Rome, invaded by Rome into every part.  Even his soul.

.


	2. Chapter 2

"'By attaching himself to a person of beauty, I think, and keeping company with him,' she said, 'he begets and procreates what he has long been pregnant with; present and absent he remembers him, and with him fosters what is begotten.'"  
          -- Plato, _Symposium_

 

After the surgery, Marcus's leg gets better. Rufrius Galarius spoke plainly before he left-- that Marcus would treat his leg gently until at least the summer if he did not want to be a cripple for the rest of his life-- so much of Marcus's stubborn resistance to care melts away. As a centurion, Marcus learned to hold recklessness in contempt. Esca has a vision in his mind of a young legionary who acted out of turn in a training exercise and ended up laming a horse. These distinctions are clear in Esca's mind, though no one explained them: warrior, soldier, centurion, legionary.

By the time Marcus's wound is healed enough to bear weight, his leg has gone mostly unused for several months, so it takes work to rebuild. He walks from his bed to the veranda and stops to rest on the stone bench there; he walks from his veranda to the grove of apple trees in the west courtyard and sits on an edge of the walled pond. He walks from the apple grove to the bath-house, where Esca helps him into the bath and massages the weakened, knotted muscle of his thigh.

Marcus's foremost thoughts are of the ache in his leg, and his own impatience with his recovery, but as Esca touches him his grimace smooths out, to be replaced with meditative blankness.

His cock grows hard in the water, and Esca knows they won't speak of it, but there's no hope of hiding it.

It won't be like yesterday, in Marcus's bed, when Marcus bundled a blanket in his lap as though Esca, with his hands pressed to Marcus's leg, couldn't feel his arousal-- as though they didn't both know it was an echo of Esca's own-- and Marcus cleared his throat and said, "They may need you in the stables."

Listening to tales of _anam-cara_  in his youth, Esca was too young to have much interest in fucking, so his primary associations were with glory and might on the battlefield. As a boy he imagined two men-- the first _anam-cara_ story he can remember was about Cú Chulainn and Láeg-- standing together in the maelstrom of battle, the spearman and his charioteer in perfect harmony, driving through their field of enemies. But now he is in the reality of it, sharing a household with his _anam-cara_ , and the life of battle has left them both behind.

In its place is protectiveness and sex, in muted colors: a fluctuating, half-acknowledged warmth between a half-lamed Roman and his slave, the latter shelling beans, pouring wine, untying sandals, the former avoiding his _anam-cara_ 's touch.

Esca can't fault him, though.

He has seen Marcus's memories of fighting with his step-uncle, of snapping at Stephanos-- of occasionally biting his tongue when he disagreed with a commanding officer but mostly of making his feelings known, his expressive face a clear picture of cheer or melancholy or reluctant compliance; several times since the solstice, tears of frustration in his eyes.

Esca, meanwhile, has been a slave for several years now. In his first month of captivity, he pulled himself far beneath the surface, a polished jet bead, an infertile bedrock underneath all his obeisances. He cried once, in fury and heartbreak, in apology, and then never again.  It is easier for Esca for feel simple desire without risking anything of himself.

Even so, Esca keeps his mind on his service to Marcus and his desire for him, and little else. The thought of his father's memory, his father's defeat, as an artifact of Roman triumph in Marcus's mind makes Esca feel sick, but he can't summon any heat in himself against the other man: it is futile. He knows that he is made to love Marcus. It makes him feel ashamed.

Just as Marcus works to obscure his stupid military secrets in the noise of his mind, as though Esca would care about them, even if Esca weren't his thrall, Esca works to put thoughts of his tribe from his mind. He thinks only in Latin.

 

+

 

Esca learns the Latin word by accident, from Stephanos of all people. _Soul-mate._

News has come to the villa that a haruspex, who can apparently read the future in the intestines of a sacrificed sheep, is visiting one of the temples in Calleva. "You should go," Uncle Aquila says to Marcus over dinner, eyes thoughtful. "It may ease your mind."

Marcus's mouth twists wryly. "Or weigh it further."

The next day a man from the market delivers several bags of olives to the villa, and Stephanos sets about teaching Esca how to press them into oil. They and Sassticca and Nesta, another of the kitchen slaves, sit around a loose circle, surrounded by wicker baskets for the oily meat of the olive and metal basins for the pits.

Sassticca pries open an olive, spreading its flesh with her thumbs, and leans over to Nesta with a smile. "Tell your fortune, young miss?" Nesta laughs.

"You know, my mother's mistress took her to a haruspex once," says Stephanos. Stephanos is a severe man, and not one for humor or play in the household, disapproving of Esca in general-- but he is strangely fond of stories, especially stories about love and devotion and self-sacrifice.

"It was unheard of for a mistress to provide for her slave so. She was a kind woman, a lady of generosity and impeccable virtue." He tells a story about his mother's owner buying her a bracelet after seeing his mother admire it in the market. Stephanos tends to rhapsodics when speaking of the goodness of his owners and his parents' owners. Then: "The haruspex told her she had a soul-mate with yellow hair."

"I don't know that word," Esca says, sliding a basket of olive meat away from Sassticca's feet and replacing it with an empty one.

Stephanos glances over with a pleased smile.

Long ago, he explains, humans had four arms and four legs and one head with two faces-- but the gods feared their strength, and so Zeus split them with lightning bolts and thus created humans as they are now: one face, two arms, two legs, wandering the earth in search of their other half. Esca leans over his bowl of olives as he listens, mouth a grim line. Split by a strange god: one body, one mind, one single country of origin.

When Stephanos finishes, Esca hands him a new bowl of unpitted olives.

"Did your mother's soul-mate turn out to have yellow hair?" he asks.

Stephanos's smile dims. He glances self-consciously as the other slaves. "Well. Her mistress rarely traveled."

 

+

 

As Marcus grows stronger, he becomes more mobile-- and after a long season spent abed, he spends as much time as he can outside. The olive hues of his skin come to full color, ruddy in the cold, and he puts away his pale linen tunics in exchange for braccae and tunics made of British wool, dyed with madder root and woad. To Esca he is inexpressibly handsome, but he can see in Marcus's mind that the braccae feel womanish to him. He is shy in front of Stephanos and his uncle, for it, but Marcus's self-consciousness fades quickly in the brisk sunshine of the British spring.

He relies on Esca less and less, but strangely that eases things between them. They rarely touch, and their restlessness grows, but it's easier for them to be near each other.

Close to the Beltane, Marcus travels with his uncle by ox-cart to Londinium, a full day's ride to the east, to pass a week-long Roman spring festival with his uncle's friends.

"Maybe next year you and I can go," Marcus says as he packs, but his face is troubled.

At first Esca's dreams that week are ornate and strange, full of color, alive with Marcus's curiosity and general love of fellowship-- but three days in, Esca is in the stables currying the dappled mare, and a stab of loneliness hits him so hard that he fumbles his brush, jolting back against the stall and spooking the horse. Esca sets a soothing hand on her flank, breathing deeply.

 Half a week later, Marcus returns silently to the house in his ox-cart. He meets Esca's eyes as Stephanos orders Esca to help unload his master's things, but they don't exchange words; Esca trails behind Marcus with a satchel and a small chest, then unloads them next to Marcus's oakwood trunk. He turns to see Marcus lowering himself to Esca's pallet, mindful of his knee. Then Marcus looks up at him, expression lost. Esca stoops in front of him, pulling Marcus's face to tuck against his neck, fingers clenching over-hard in Marcus's hair, punishingly, painfully tight, while Marcus shakes in his arms like a newborn colt.

 

+

 

By the midsummer, Marcus is well enough to hold his thighs around the flank of a horse, and after weeks of taking rides around the city walls, ambling along the riverside and back, Marcus wants to go hunting.

Outside the south gate, they cross a field toward the forest, and Marcus urges his gelding into a full run, toward nothing, only to circle back and meet Esca near the treeline, grinning, face red from the wind.

Marcus calms his gelding with a gentle hand as he catches his breath. He turns back to look at the city walls, the pasture land to the south, the giant cloudless sky above them. He is a beauty, strong and broad as his horse, graceful even after a year of misuse. Pleasure and exhilaration flow from him in waves.

In another life, he would have been an honored warrior, a shield-brother, an undisputed blessing. Instead, he finds himself here-- a man who considers himself somehow shamed, despite his resilience and valor, caught up in the net of Esca's life, sometimes playful as a boy, sometimes tender as a woman.  Something like gratitude, only more jagged, breaks open inside Esca's chest.

Marcus whips his head around to meet Esca's eyes, a soft, stunned look on his face.

 

+

 

On the morning of the Lùnastal, Esca takes a fever. He empties his stomach on the grass next to one of the villa's external walls and then slumps, grinding his head against the painted stone. His thoughts swim, and he doesn't know what Marcus hears or feels from him-- he never knows-- but Marcus finds him like that within the hour.

"Esca," he says, kneeling next to him. He wipes Esca's mouth with a corner of his cloak.

Together, they make it back to Marcus's room, Esca taking as much of his own weight as he can on trembling legs. Marcus walks them past Esca's pallet to the bed. "No," Esca says, keenly aware of the dirt and grass stuck to his palms, the bile sitting low in his throat.

"Shh," Marcus says, and bends to take off Esca's sandals.

He pushes Esca back against the pillow then leaves to move around the room. Esca's eyes slide closed, but he hears the sound of pouring water, and then Marcus is back with a hand on the back of his head, lifting him to drink. Esca huffs against the lip of the cup, choking a little, and Marcus moves his thumb to the bare skin behind Esca's ear, settling him, filling Esca with quiet as he takes a cautious sip.

Then Marcus sets him back against the pillow and cleans him with a wet cloth, his palms, his face, then folds another cool cloth across Esca's forehead. Marcus slips his other hand into the neck of Esca's tunic, just to rest it there, thumb stretched out along Esca's collarbone, fingers curling gently around the base of his neck.

Esca isn't sure how long it lasts. Marcus leaves and returns a dozen times. At some point, the room is dark, and Esca hears the wordless tune of a song from his youth, that his mother used to sing when her children were ill, rough in Marcus's low voice. Esca's face is wet, and he isn't sure why.

"I'm tired," Esca says in his own tongue. Marcus smooths the hair off of his forehead, thumb tracing the line of his eyebrow. Esca hears, in his own tongue, _Then sleep_.

 

* * *

  

The field of your homeland stretches out in front of you, deathly quiet. You slide off the bay mare and wrap her lead around the long hitching-rail that was once regularly home to twenty horses, when war parties were gathered in your father's house. The posts are made of thick oak, dug deep into the ground, and the rail will be in good repair for another fifty years at least. You can be proud of that.

With a deep breath, you pull an empty sack from the saddlebag. It is hard work ahead of you, and your body already aches.

But before you've taken two steps towards your father's house, you hear a familiar song. The deerskin of the nearest roundhouse flaps open, and Marcus steps out. His cloak is spotted with dirt and rotted hay, his face smeared with soot and chalk. He's carrying two large sacks, cradled gently in his arms.

He sees you and gestures, with a jut of his chin, for you to join him at the log bench outside the house. "Everything was in the grain pit, as you said," says Marcus, his somber eyes on yours as you settle next to him. "No one else has been down there."

You let out a long breath of relief. They are safe: the bodies were laid to rest, and no one has pillaged them. "The bones?"

"They're clean," he says, nodding. "They're ready."

You pull one of the sacks near to you. The bones inside are dry and whole.  One by one you set the remains out in the grass: your father's skull, adorned with a gold circlet;  an intact finger in a bed of peat moss, from Bearnas, one of the household slaves, who taught you to play at dice; a lock of your mother's hair preserved with sand. The short, brittle femur of your little brother.  "I found Niall's brooch," Marcus says, setting out a finely-wrought silver brooch. Its softened edge is made of horses running head-to-tail on a track that circles around the brooch, never-ending.

There is much to take back with you, and your limbs are weak with fever, but Marcus is strong and gentle next to you, laying out the bones of your family with calm reverence. You will carry the memories of your tribe with you, and he will help you.

"Also," Marcus says. From one of the sacks he pulls a wooden plate and a leather bag; he empties thick slices of pear onto the plate and hands it to you. "I brought this for you."

"Is it Roman?" you ask. The pear is a different shape from the pears you know from your youth, a different hue, but it's large, large enough for the two of you, the slices wet with juice.

Marcus shrugs a shoulder, turning back to sift through his granary sack. "Not anymore."

 

* * *

 

 

The next few months pass in a whirl of travel and adventure. More of Uncle Aquila's friends come through, and within a week's time, Esca and Marcus are journeying north to put Marcus's own father to rest, in the form of a golden eagle. Before they leave, Marcus gives Esca his letter of manumission, signed by the elder Aquila.

"In case something happens to me," Marcus says, turning back to the saddlebag spread out on his bed, "my uncle knows my possessions are to pass to you."

Esca says nothing immediately-- the river of his thoughts continues to thaw and make way for Marcus, every day, but he will always lean toward cautious silence. But at the end of their first day on the road, bedded down beneath a tree, Esca reaches across the small space between them to set his hand around the familiar curve of Marcus's bicep. He hopes that Marcus can feel that if something happens to Marcus-- nothing will matter.

Esca leads Marcus to the battle-site where the united tribes stood against the Ninth Legion twenty years ago, where Marcus's father fell, and they stand in the forest, hands clasped, quietly sharing memories between them: images of Esca's tribe rejoicing at the news that Roman invaders were turned back; images of Marcus's father placing a red-crested helmet on his head, soon to march out, smiling down at his eight-year-old son.

They track the eagle to the Royal Clan of the Epidaii, and the extraction is difficult, but it goes smoothly. Esca pretends to be a Briton paid to escort Marcus, or Demetrius, a Greek eye-doctor, through Caledonia; they wait for a festival that brings many clans and a handful of foreigners to the village, then make away with the eagle in the night. No one is killed. They carry the eagle all the way to Rome, where they board with Marcus's aunt and step-uncle, who largely ignore Esca but fawn over Marcus, displaying Marcus at dinner parties, telling modified (Esca can feel it) versions of stories from Marcus's childhood. When Esca feels Marcus's frame tighten with disquiet under the eyes of his countrymen, his kin, he gentles him with a press of his knuckles against Marcus's bare knee, a subtle hand on Marcus's arm.

By the time they return to Calleva, it is the Yuletide, but Esca doesn't remember until Marcus mentions it.

It's easy to lose track of the movement of the sun, the length of every day, without the static fixtures of the homestead to gauge it by. So they seek for those fixtures-- Marcus in Britain and Esca among Roman expatriots.

Esca is in their room in Calleva, mending a long tear in his cloak, when Marcus brings him a slender stalk of mistletoe, held carefully in his hand. He sits down on the bed next to Esca, and Esca looks up from his work, and they lean into each other, mouths catching.

They breathe into each other while Marcus's free hand travels up Esca's jaw and around the shell of his ear, thumb stroking Esca's cheek. Esca's mending rests in his lap, and he reaches up to cup Marcus's chin, then runs the backs of his fingers down Marcus's throat, down, to knot his hand in the collar of Marcus's tunic. By now the shock of relief when they touch is worn down into something comfortable and warm, but the fire still runs hot in their blood, and the relief still catches them in startlement, in breathless hope, every now and then.

Esca lets him go, after a moment, with a close-mouthed kiss against his bottom lip. "What do you have?"

Marcus pulls back and shows Esca the mistletoe: a fuzzy golden bough, crowded with clusters of spoon-shaped leaves and berries white as snow. He looks up at Esca. "It's the Yuletide."

Esca raises his eyebrows. "So it is."

"I, I don't," says Marcus, frowning down at the sprig. "I only remember part of it." He turns the mistletoe curiously in his hand. "It stays alive and golden even as the life of the oak tree passes out of it. So it's sacred for the solstice."

Esca nods. "It would be blessed by a holy man," he says, thinking of the wild-eyed druid at Isca Dumnoniorum whose chariot in had nearly ruined Marcus's leg. Whose intercession, though, however malignantly meant, had brought Marcus to him. "Then given as a gift or hung in your home as a protection through the winter."

Marcus grins crookedly. "Well, I'm not a holy man, but we could still hang it."

Esca touches his dark hair, and Marcus leans into the touch.

"You have a story too," Esca says, though it is a dim, shadowy shape in his mind, so it can't be too great a presence in Marcus's mind. "Someone traveling in water."

Marcus nods. "Aeneas, the father of Rome. He wanted to visit the underworld, and golden light from a bough of mistletoe lit his way."

"I can well believe that," Esca says, curling his fingers around the sprig in Marcus's palm, which folds around him. "Light in the dark, as with life in the winter."

He likes that better than the Roman understanding of soul-mates. Not a body returned to its original state, to a past dwelling, but a man carrying an object of life amid death; moving forward, even in darkness, growing something, a body made new through new stories.

 

.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. The epigraphs from Plato's _Symposium_ are paraphrases of the Greek philosopher [Diotima of Mantineia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diotima_of_Mantinea).
> 
> 2\. _Anam-cara_ is not really the same principle as _soul-mate_ in the modern sense, or even in line with the Greek tradition, but that's what makes it an AU, right? That is one of the things that makes it an AU.
> 
> 3\. Forbearance on the timeline for this, please, which is probably not realistic. Google Maps tells me that it is currently possible to walk from London to Rome in 15 days, but I have never tried it.


End file.
